The present invention relates to the transmission of digital data, particularly the transmission of digital data which represents video signals.
It is generally acknowledged that some form of digital transmission will be required for the next generation of television (TV) technology, conventionally referred to as high definition television, or HDTV. This requirement is due mostly to the fact that much more powerful video compression schemes can be implemented with digital signal processing than with analog signal processing. However, there has been some concern about becoming committed to an all-digital transmission system because of the potential sensitivity of digital transmission to small variations in signal-to-noise ratio, or SNR, at the various receiving locations.
This phenomenon--sometimes referred to as the "threshold effect"--can be illustrated by considering the case of two television receivers that are respectively located at 50 and 63 miles from a television broadcast station. Since the power of the broadcast signal varies roughly as the inverse square of the distance, it is easily verified that the difference in the amount of signal power received by the television receivers is about 2 dB. Assume, now, that a digital transmission scheme is used and that transmission to the receiver that is 50 miles distant exhibits a bit-error rate of 10.sup.-6. If the 2 dB of additional signal loss for the other TV set translated into a 2 dB decrease of the SNR at the input of the receiver, then this receiver will operate with a bit-error rate of about 10.sup.-4. With these kinds of bit-error rates, the TV set that is 50 miles away would have a very good reception, whereas reception for the other TV set would probably be very poor. This kind of quick degradation in performance over short distances is generally not considered acceptable by the broadcasting industry. (By comparison, the degradation in performance for presently used analog TV transmission schemes is much more graceful.)
There is thus required a digital transmission scheme adaptable for use in television applications which overcomes this problem. Solutions used in other digital transmission environments--such as the use of a) regenerative repeaters in cable-based transmission systems or b) fall-back data rates or conditioned telephone lines in voiceband data applications--are clearly inapplicable to the free-space broadcast environment of television.
The co-pending, commonly assigned United States patent application of V. B. Lawrence et al. entitled "Coding for Digital Transmission," Ser. No. 07/611,225, filed on Nov. 07, 1990, discloses a technique for overcoming the shortcomings of standard digital transmission for over-the-air broadcasting of digital TV signals. Specifically, the Lawrence et al. patent application teaches the notion of characterizing the HDTV signal into classes of "less important" and "more important" information which will then use a constellation of non-uniformly spaced signal points. This approach provides unequal error protection, i.e., more error protection for the more important information, and allows a graceful degradation in reception quality at the TV set location because, as the bit-error rate at the receiver begins to increase with increasing distance from the broadcast transmitter, it will be the bits that represent proportionately less of the TV signal information that will be the first to be affected.